Payments-led growth is thinking beyond the subscription. It’s a strategy for vertical SaaS platforms to drive revenue by integrating payments into their product offerings, opening up additional revenue streams and reducing platform friction.
But not only does payments-led growth benefit your customers, it also creates company-wide alignment across revenue teams, from product to sales to marketing. When integrated in a SaaS platform, payments as a capability drive significant, scalable, and sustainable business growth.
In this blog, we’ll discuss why more vertical SaaS companies should incorporate payments within their platforms.
From explosive growth to today’s macroeconomic climate in SaaS
Since 2010, the industry has seen unprecedented growth in SaaS, with evolutionary changes in innovation across the ecosystem. The global SaaS market size was estimated at USD 399.10 billion in 2024, and it is projected to reach USD 819.23 billion by 2030.
Yet not nearly enough SaaS companies and ISVs are placing payments at the forefront of their growth strategies. According to a recent survey by Stax, 91% of ISVs expect embedded payments to play a larger role in their growth strategy over the next 12 months.
However, many are hitting a wall when it comes to implementing payments, citing integration complexity as a top challenge, alongside rigid pricing or revenue-sharing models. This is why choosing the right payments partner is key to scalable, payments-led growth.
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How to succeed with payments-led growth
Partners from all ends of the spectrum of payments integration must commit to driving revenue through payments to succeed in future years.
While implementing embedded banking solutions is a great way to stay relevant with competitors, that alone as a driving factor often doesn’t lead to success. Without a financial imperative with the intention of driving profitable growth month to month, post-implementation can be stagnant.
Partners that successfully implement the payments-led growth framework:
- Bake the financial reward into their AOP.
- Recognize that integration is just the beginning of their payments journey.
- Hire individuals to support driving feature adoption for new and current users.
- Don’t look at payments as a mere feature or product offering but as a driver in profitable growth for their business.
Using adoption expertise to leverage payments
As mentioned previously, the initial integration is just the beginning of the payments-led growth journey. Adding a feature such as payments can widen your product offerings; however, if it’s not marketed or part of a customer’s onboarding process, payments can often fall flat. It’s one thing to have a thousand customers and a payment capability, but if nobody’s using that capability, then you’ve got unrealized potential—and money left on the table.
That’s why many partners of Stax Connect lean on our team of adoption experts. Typical sales representatives are well-versed and highly competent in their software, but they’re not always payment experts. That’s where a strong payments partner, such as Stax, can come in—educating marketing, sales, and leadership on how to sell payments and drive adoption and awareness of payments as a capability.
Payments-led growth success stories
Integrating payments with flexible technology can dictate the path that makes the most sense for your business solution. With a white-labeled API and pre-built enrollment workflows, accepting payments can be done within days. For more advanced systems or platforms that want to own and monetize costs fully, fully ingesting an API with multiple payment capabilities is also a solution. With Stax’s RESTful API, adding payment processing capabilities to your software and mobile applications is simple.
Moreover, Stax also provides partners with custom fee structures, surcharging, and other strategies to monetize their payment capabilities.
Final words: Diversifying revenue beyond the subscription
Many companies that consider incorporating payments into their products need to ask themselves three key questions:
- What payment capabilities do you need? Many payment methods are available for transactions—including ACH, split payments, Text2Pay, digital wallets, BNPL, and more.
- What partner offers these capabilities to integrate into your SaaS platform? Some partners may have all the capabilities you need but offer limited support.
- How can you monetize your payment capabilities in the right way to drive growth for your organization and benefit your customers?
We believe that all companies are payment companies; they just don’t know it.
Typically, most software enables consumers to consume goods and services that must be paid for. If you don’t have a payments component to help, then you’re effectively pivoting your customers outside of your solution somewhere else, which creates friction for them in the long run.
Payments-led growth is about thinking beyond the subscription and how you can leverage payments to drive sustainable and profitable business growth. It is the key to success in the current economic climate.
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Quick FAQs about payments-led growth
Q: What is payments-led growth for vertical SaaS companies?
Payments-led growth is a strategy where a vertical SaaS company embeds payment processing into its platform to create new revenue streams, improve customer experience, and reduce friction. Instead of relying only on subscription revenue, the software provider can monetize payment activity directly within its product.
Q: Why should SaaS companies diversify revenue beyond subscriptions?
Subscription revenue can be limited by customer acquisition, churn, and pricing pressure. Embedded payments give SaaS companies an additional, usage-based revenue stream that can scale as customers process more transactions through the platform.
Q: How do embedded payments improve the customer experience?
Embedded payments keep the payment process inside the software platform, reducing the need for customers to use separate systems or third-party tools. This can simplify workflows, speed up transactions, and make the platform more valuable to end users.
Q: What payment capabilities should a SaaS platform consider offering?
Common payment capabilities include credit and debit card processing, ACH payments, split payments, Text2Pay, digital wallets, recurring billing, and surcharging options. The right mix depends on the platform’s customer base, transaction types, and monetization goals.
Q: Why is payment adoption important after integration?
Integrating payments is only the first step. If customers are not educated, onboarded, or encouraged to use the payment features, the platform may miss out on revenue opportunities. Strong adoption efforts help turn embedded payments into an active growth driver.
Q: What teams should be involved in a payments-led growth strategy?
Payments-led growth typically requires alignment across product, sales, marketing, customer success, and leadership. Product teams handle integration, sales and marketing drive awareness, customer success supports adoption, and leadership ensures payments are tied to business goals.
Q: What should SaaS companies look for in a payments partner?
SaaS companies should look for a payments partner that offers flexible integration options, strong API capabilities, multiple payment methods, reliable support, adoption expertise, and monetization options, such as custom fee structures or revenue-sharing models.
Q: How can SaaS companies monetize embedded payments?
SaaS companies can monetize embedded payments through processing revenue, custom fee structures, surcharging strategies, or other payment-related service fees. The best approach should support profitable growth while still delivering value to customers.
Q: Is embedded payments integration always complex?
Not always. Some platforms can use pre-built enrollment workflows or white-labeled APIs to start accepting payments quickly. More advanced platforms may choose deeper API integrations to gain greater control over payment capabilities and monetization.
Q: How does payments-led growth reduce platform friction?
Payments-led growth reduces friction by allowing users to complete transactions within the same software they already use to manage their business. This keeps customers on the platform and avoids sending them to separate payment providers or disconnected workflows.
Q: Why are vertical SaaS companies well suited for embedded payments?
Vertical SaaS companies serve specific industries with specialized workflows, which often include payments as a natural part of the customer journey. By embedding payments, these platforms can solve a critical operational need while creating a scalable revenue opportunity.
Q: When should a SaaS company add payments to its platform?
A SaaS company should consider adding payments when its customers regularly accept or manage transactions as part of their workflow. If payments are happening outside the platform, embedding them can improve convenience, increase product value, and support revenue growth.
